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Welcome to this week's instalment of /r/AskHistorians' Sunday Digest (formerly the Day of Reflection). Nobody can read all the questions and answers that are posted here, so in this thread we invite you to share anything you'd like to highlight from the last week - an interesting discussion, an informative answer, an insightful question that was overlooked, or anything else.

Every day hundreds of new users discover /r/AskHistorians, and many of them take a stab and start answering questions. Some, unfortunately, just plain didn't read the rules and it shows, but there are also well-intentioned users who give it a try, but don't quite measure up to the expectations of the subreddit. While we do our best to provide a clear set of rules that lay it all out, we also realize that it can be rather daunting to ingest all at once, but really, it isn't quite necessary. The core requirements of /r/AskHistorians can be distilled down to what we term 'The Four Questions', and when even the best intentioned writers have their efforts removed, more often then not, it is because they failed to heed them.

While this series of Roundtables will eventually be visiting all the rules of the subreddit, for this installment, we're going to start there, at the heart of it all, and walk through how a user should think about what they have written, and how a mod will then likewise do the same!

The Four Questions

For every answer written, we expect users to ask themselves the following questions:

• Do I have the expertise needed to answer this question?
• Have I done research on this topic?
• Can I cite academic quality primary and secondary sources?
• Can I answer follow-up questions?

It is important that they not only answer "Yes" to themselves, but more importantly even, that they ensure what they have written has reflected it. Just as we want you to be able to answer "Yes" to yourself, the Modteam in evaluating the answer, needs to feel reasonably confident that you can as well, and as we don't know you personally, there are only the words that you have written to sway our thinking. Some of these relate to other rules which will be explored in more depth in later Roundtables, so it is not the last word, but in this one we'll briefly visit how a Moderator evaluates each of these in terms of what they are seeing on the page, and how each question leads to the next. An answer doesn't need to hit every single point, but the more that it does the more positive the evaluation is likely to be.

Do I have the expertise?

How does one get across 'expertise' in this medium? One of the unofficial mottoes of the subreddit is that a good answer isn't good because it is right, but because it explains, and this goes a long way to explaining what we are looking for in making that call. Many answers might be able to get a basic answer that is roughly correct based on 5 minutes of Google and skimming a Wikipedia page, and it is often fairly easy to tell the difference because that can often provide the first type of comment - a technically correct response - but it rarely forms the basis of one which goes the extra distance to ensure it explains, by fleshing things out to provide more context be comprehensively tackle the topic.

When you're writing, step back and think about how your answer might appear to someone else. Does it look like a second-hand Wikipedia summary, or does it look like someone who can go beyond that? The core idea that expertise is going to reflect here is that you have the kind of preexisting knowledge of the broad topic to place it into its larger context. This is doubly important for answers which might actually be simple, as placing them in context can be an important piece of making clear that that really is all there is to it.

Have I done research on this topic?

This is of course closely intertwined with expertise, but not quite the same. While expertise speaks to your broad understanding of the topic, let's say "I'm an expert on 16th century England!", research gets more to the very specifics of the question. Often, questions won't be perfectly aligned to your current vein of research, and you'll be doing off-the-cuff research for the specific question. That's fine! We all find ourselves doing it. What is key is that you have the background knowledge to help direct that research.

How does this look on the page? Well, answers which engage heavily in speculation and little in certainty will always set off alarm bells, and on the flip side answers which speak with absolute authority but provide nothing to support it can come off as suspect as well. The clearest way to show you have done the research is to lay out the research! We don't mean an entire methodology chapter, but we do mean discussing why we know something, or even more importantly, why we don't and what leads historians to speculate about something in a certain way. Especially in topics where there is uncertainty, being honest and discussing the competing interpretations also can help lay out your understanding of a topic. In sum, if you've researched the topic, what we want to see is that you can go in-depth about it.

Can I cite academic quality primary and secondary sources?

For both of the above, citing sources can be a very easy way to help lay things out. While our sourcing rule does not require sources to be included in a post, only provided upon request, that doesn't mean that their presence, or lack thereof, doesn't play a part in a holistic evaluation of an answer. A response that is just on the edge, all else being equal, might manage to be nudged into 'Acceptable' by including some while in turn might just fail to hit the mark and be removed if it lacks any. A lack of sources doesn't 100 percent guarantee removal, nor their presence the reverse, but it plays a part.

Likewise, the quality of sources plays an important part in our evaluations. Strong preference is given to academic sources over popular ones. Similarly more recent works are preferred to out of date ones. We'll often check up on sources, and track down reviews, so the quality of sources can play a part too, at times. Citing sources is good, but engaging with them is better. We don't need footnotes and an accompanying bibliographical essay, but working the sources into the answer itself, and even better, playing sources off of one another to discuss their strengths and limitations, is one way than an answer can truly go above and beyond.

Can I answer follow-up questions?

Obviously this one seems a bit harder to show, given how it depends on the follow-up questions showing up. In the first, that isn't entirely true. Getting back to the first question, showing off how you understand the broader topic on hand can mean anticipating the most obvious follow-up questions. Consider the answer as someone entirely ignorant might, and after you've addressed the core question, use those angles to flesh things out. As a mod, if I have a question that seems obvious to me after reading the first paragraph, and then it is answered for me in the third paragraph, I'm going to think much more positively than if there are only two paragraphs and my question still lingers!

Insofar as answering the actual follow-ups, a few things are worth noting. The first is that we don't expect anyone to answer every single one, especially for answers that get super popular, but we are looking for a good-faith effort to respond to a nice selection of them. But while we are understanding of time-zones and real life obligations, if we are seeing a lot of obvious follow-ups going unanswered after many hours, it is going to influence how we might reevaluate an answer. The two most important things to keep in mind though are the following:

1. If you get push-back, don't ignore it. If it is rude or insulting, the mods will likely step in, but as long as it is in good faith, we very much prefer to see engagement with it. That doesn't mean you need to concede anything or find middle ground, but recognizing the disagreement and explaining why your interpretation differs is important.
2. Don't fake it! Answering follow-up questions doesn't mean answering every follow-up question. Often they can get quite tangential, and just because you know about one thing doesn't mean you know about everything even slightly related. While we certainly are going to weigh just how central a question might be to the core argument of a post, "Sorry, that isn't part of the focus of my research, but I'd love to see someone else weigh in" is perfectly fine in most cases.

I Did All That And Still Got Removed! What Gives?

In the end, following all of the above perfectly isn't going to ensure approval every time, but it does come pretty close, and it isn't an exaggeration to say that the majority of removals are because of a lack of external reflection on those four key points. Still though, mods are only human. We do sometimes make mistakes. Especially in cases where our evaluation is right on the edge of allowable or not, we'll often reach out privately to users to help them improve an answer to the point where it can be approved. But in any case, if you disagree with the removal of a response you wrote, a polite message to modmail laying out your case for reinstatement will always be received warmly, even if we can't guarantee that it will change our minds.